How It Played in Pravda

Mikhail Gorbachev has been running the Soviet Union for eight months, and his photograph has long since become a fixture on the front pages of U.S. newspapers. Ronald Reagan has been President of the U.S. for 58 months, and his photograph had never made the front page of any Soviet newspaper--until last week.

Instead of the customary caricature portraying him as an American cowboy brandishing nuclear missiles, the front page of the Communist Party daily Pravda carried a shot of Reagan chatting informally with Gorbachev in front of a blazing fire. The Geneva encounter also provided Reagan's debut on Soviet television, which carried the summit's closing ceremonies in full as well as uncensored coverage of Gorbachev's press conference. In Moscow, television stores quickly filled with passersby curious to get a look at Reagan in action.

While Soviet news coverage of the Geneva summit was lively and thorough by past standards, the story was still carefully tailored for domestic audiences. Soviet TV's news team was led by Valentin Zorin, 61, the gray-haired, avuncular dean of Moscow's on-air political analysts. Zorin's background reports came principally from Georgi Arbatov, the Kremlin's top-ranking Americanologist. Like other Soviet journalists, Zorin adopted a tone of cautious optimism once the summit was under way, telling his audience of 150 million on the 9 o'clock nightly newscast Vremya (Time), "If the two leaders manage to take even just a first step, that is very good." Nevertheless, the newscasts were less than complete: in a feature on Gorbachev's discussion of nuclear test bans with Jesse Jackson, Broadcaster Boris Kalyagin neglected to mention that Jackson twice expressed concern over Soviet treatment of Jews.

Moscow's mood swings were carefully monitored by newsmen from other members of the Warsaw Pact, who adjusted the tone of their reports accordingly. The trench-coated cadre kept watch on the summit press center's bulletin boards, which displayed the latest dispatches from the government news agency TASS. Declared Boris Tchakarov, correspondent for the Sofia daily Zemedelsko Zname (Agrarian Banner): "I want to see how TASS is writing about events." In the East bloc news game, not only do you get no extra points for scooping the big guys, you might lose some.